Salt, Spirit, and Memory

Black Caribbean Feminine Ways of Knowing

Author: Julia S. Jordan-Zachery

Discovering healing and freedom through memory, spirit, and storytelling

Cloth – $110

979-8-240-40120-6

Paper – $25

979-8-240-40121-3

eBook – $24.95

979-8-240-40122-0

Publication Date

Paperback: 06/01/2027
Cloth: 06/01/2027

Series: Dissident Feminisms

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About the Book

Julia S. Jordan-Zachery’s intimate and political exploration works to uncover healing, freedom, and Black feminine ways of knowing. In this liberation project, Jordan-Zachery illuminates the role of care and community in resisting oppression. She uses multiple forms of writing—including letters, stream of consciousness, and academic reflection—to honor Black women’s voices and challenge conventions. Relational and communal practice connects people to ancestors, nature, memory, and sources of knowledge beyond Western traditions. Spirit becomes a guide for understanding pain and reclaiming dignity. As Jordan-Zachery rejects suffering to focus on healing and creation, she weaves memory, spirit, ancestral knowledge, and Bajan dialect into a text that reflects Black feminine knowledge-making.

An account of a powerful journey of transformation, Salt, Spirit, and Memory celebrates Black women’s talk and living, and how writing fueled by the spirit invites healing.

* Thanks to the office of the Dean of the College at Wake Forest University for the support in making this book possible.

About the Author

Julia S. Jordan-Zachery is a professor in and chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wake Forest University. Her books include Shadow Bodies: Black Women, Ideology, Representation, and Politics and Erotic Testimonies: Black Women Daring to be Wild and Free.

Reviews

“Salt, Spirit, and Memory is a brave meditation on mother–daughter love, memory, and the enduring archive and architectures of Black Caribbean feminine sensibilities. This extraordinary book offers an expansive study of healing as an expression of sovereignty, ancestral intelligence, and sacred directive. As she asks us to expand in every direction, Julia S. Jordan-Zachery provides a powerful work of intellectual and spiritual reclamation, and a profound study on how transformation becomes generative, knowledge becomes wisdom, and memory becomes legacy.”
—Ruth Nicole Brown, author of Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood